the wise Porphyry think that all souls come to be born because of
water, and that "even the generation of images in the mind is from
water"?


1902.




THE OLD TOWN


I fell, one night some fifteen years ago, into what seemed the power
of faery.

I had gone with a young man and his sister--friends and relations of
my own--to pick stories out of an old countryman; and we were coming
home talking over what he had told us. It was dark, and our
imaginations were excited by his stories of apparitions, and this may
have brought us, unknown to us, to the threshold, between sleeping and
waking, where Sphinxes and Chimaeras sit open-eyed and where there are
always murmurings and whisperings. I cannot think that what we saw was
an imagination of the waking mind. We had come under some trees that
made the road very dark, when the girl saw a bright light moving slowly
across the road. Her brother and myself saw nothing, and did not see
anything until we had walked for about half-an-hour along the edge of
the river and down a narrow lane to some fields where there was a
ruined church covered with ivy, and the foundations of what was called
"the Old Town," which had been burned down, it was said, in Cromwell's